Tony review: Anthony Bourdain gets a rosy yet heartfelt origin story

The year is 1975 and a young Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) faces a panel of university professors in a sacrosanct office. The kid’s woolly sideburns and a full head of curly hair hide much of what his face is trying to say, but the cockiness in his speech can’t be masked. Tony, as he prefers to be referred to (because only his mother calls him Anthony), has a pitch for a novel that captures an imagined conversation between writers Jack Kerouac and George Orwell, which is to further secure him a place in the university’s coveted fellowship programme. Only one student gets access to it in a term and Tony wants it perhaps not because he wants to write the book. It is rather to hold his head at the dinner table later at home, when his mother (played by Dagmara Domińczyk) isn’t correcting his pronunciation of the German word Bildungsroman, meaning coming-of-age.

The scene inside the university office, interestingly, comes as a feint towards Bourdain’s real-life persona of a fast-talking, irreverent guy boasting a swindler’s charm. One assumes that the film begins with that sense of familiarity to lead into a journey that became definitive of his being over the years. It is the follow-up moments, however, that cheekily let the irony and the contrast settle in, gradually communicating that this kid Tony is not anything like the man who’d one day eat the still-beating heart of a cobra.

The early years

Tony, in fact, is weird and awkward and deluded and also insecure to the extent that he’d prefer lying about himself rather than accept even the mildest of defeats. It won’t come as a surprise that Bourdain kicked off his wanderer’s life in pursuit of a girl who didn’t reciprocate his enthusiasm for her, but Tony confirms the fact that he wasn’t ever born-ready to walk into a room and feel instantly comfortable. The humanism, the anti-pretence stance and the adventure that he would represent in the later years would need a lot of unlearning on Tony’s part, says the film, whose charm ultimately lies in its unequivocal focus on this brief phase of his life.

And Matt Johnson and his co-writers (Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels and Lou Howe) choose to take some telling liberties with the said phase, seemingly in line with Bourdain’s own tendencies as a storyteller.

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In real life, Bourdain visits Provincetown, the coastal place where the story is almost entirely set, along with his childhood crush Nancy Putkoski (Emilia Jones), but the film dramatises the relationship by making Tony follow her all the way (not in a creepy way, of course). The enigmatic, nameless Chef (Antonio Banderas) in the film, who unwittingly takes Tony under his wings after a night of misbehaviour, is also said to be an amalgamation of the many kitchen masters Bourdain met over the years. The events that occur in the restaurant that profoundly shape the 19-year-old boy as well as the narrative, too, have a whiff of fast-and-loose, in what could be interpreted as an attempt to claim Bourdain in more personal, intimate ways than public discourse recognises.

While Chef, the god-fearing purist, becomes a source of restraint and necessary dedication to one’s vocation, Leo Woodall’s Sal drags him in a different direction altogether with his unchecked confidence. Sal is the original cook at Chef’s seaside restaurant, The Flagship, and is a disarmingly skilled guy without a doubt. But his turbulent lifestyle — merrily carrying coke vials, randomly shooting up heroin, womanising — is that bait Tony is sure to take to counter his inadequacies, especially with the less flamboyant, antithetical Chef breathing down his neck at all times. The rest of the kitchen staff that plays pranks on him and just feels like a ragtag crew with little regard for discipline also rubs off on Tony, who only grows restless to find his groove.

But no one impression remains permanent on him, nor is any person the defining force of his life. Tony, in turn, proposes that Bourdain is a concoction of many experiences and vantage points, and that his true calling — food and cooking — was only a greater means to realise a penchant for living life to the fullest. His empathy for the kitchen workforce, which formed a huge chunk of his ethos, his cynicism and his overall open-mindedness gave him a magnetic personality that could never be boxed in.

Remembering him but partly

Perhaps that is another reason why the events showcased in the film come as a caustic juxtaposition to the fate Bourdain would lend himself many, many years later, when he died by suicide in a hotel room in France.

So, with that harsh fact in mind, Tony ultimately comes across as a rose-tinted portrait that chooses to remember Anthony Bourdain for his spirit and nothing more. Is that a cop-out on the makers’ part? Or is it simply an agreeable way for a kindred soul to preserve someone? The admirable thing about Tony is the latter, but it wouldn’t be incorrect to say that it also feels a tad too neatly packaged for a story that has always lived with contradictions.

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Even the emotional beats of the film cater to the template of a coming-of-age and not the fluidic, chaotic approach of its real-life subject and every character ends up functioning in service of the protagonist.

It wouldn’t be unfair either to say that Matt Johnson’s film, surprisingly, doesn’t challenge itself the way Bourdain did. And one suspects it is something he himself would find fitting. Yet, what works in its favour is its view of a person who isn’t blindly eulogised but is still certainly cared for, giving him a bildungsroman as lightweight as a smile and as satisfying as the first drag of a cigarette after a hard day’s work.